Chemical Processing

Phoenix Contact and Flowserve join Endress+Hauser’s Open Integration Partner Program, which strives to mitigate risks when commissioning customer plant by ensuring that operators can easily integrate their devices and components into automation systems, according to the company. Phoenix Contact and Flowserve join eight companies already in the program: AUMA Riester, HIMA Paul Hildebrandt, Honeywell Process Solutions, Mitsubishi Electric, Pepperl+Fuchs, Rockwell Automation, R. STAHL and Schneider Electric.
Although today’s communication components (HART, PROFIBUS, FOUNDATION Fieldbus, EtherNet/IP or PROFINET) are rigorously tested, there are still countless ways in which they can be combined and there is a residual risk that minor…

Locate suppliers in the chemical, petrochemical and refining industries.

The year in review recalls some of the most important events of 2016, and the 2017 Supplier Sourcing Guide Directory is a look forward – a tool we hope helps you throughout the new year.
The 2017 Supplier Source Guide is an easy-to-use guide to help locate suppliers to the chemical, petrochemical and refining industries.
The guide is broken out into five primary categories:1. Asset Management2. Automation3. Environmental Protection4. Processing Equipment5. Safety/Security.
Each of these main categories includes several product sub-categories listed within them.
This easy-to-use directory lists suppliers in 43 categories of equipment, products, services and software. We also have a special section focusing on 72 engineering, construction…

Understand what achieving an effective predictive maintenance program entails

Processors have relied on gas chromatographs (GCs) since the 1950s to provide real-time compositional data to control systems. Today, tens of thousands of GCs serve in a diverse range of plants — making the GC the analytical workhorse for online…

Locate suppliers in the chemical, petrochemical and refining industries.

The year in review recalls some of the most important events of 2016, and the 2017 Supplier Sourcing Guide Directory is a look forward – a tool we hope helps you throughout the new year.
The 2017 Supplier Source Guide is an easy-to-use guide to help locate suppliers to the chemical, petrochemical and refining industries.
The guide is broken out into five primary categories:1. Asset Management2. Automation3. Environmental Protection4. Processing Equipment5. Safety/Security.
Each of these main categories includes several product sub-categories listed within them.
This easy-to-use directory lists suppliers in 43 categories of equipment, products, services and software. We also have a special section focusing on 72 engineering, construction…

Mettler Toledo offers SmartCal, a test substance offering a fast way to verify the performance of a moisture analyzer, according to the company. Using SmartCal, performance testing reportedly takes 10 minutes and it is done in the same easy way as a regular moisture measurement.
Additionally, as an overall functionality assessment, SmartCal simultaneously tests both the heating and weighing units, according to Mettler Toledo. When results lie within expected tolerances, it lends validity to all measurements made since the previous test. These results are viewed in a series of clear, readable measurement reports for straightforward monitoring. They can either be stored directly in the instrument or manually entered into a free, validated…

After a three-year software evaluation period, BP reportedly selects aeSolutions’ aeShield to assist asset personnel in monitoring control, alarm and safety instrumented systems (CASIS) performance for all upstream oil and gas assets. To date, it has been a challenge to automate the monitoring of these devices due to the lack of common systems in place across BP’s facilities, according to aeSolutions.
aeShield allows centralized reporting, standard enforcement consistent with internal procedures, reduced man-hours, monitored IPLs and efficient management of change (MOC) tracking, according to the company. During initial rollout, BP will reportedly focus on HAZOP/LOPA studies, safety requirements specification, SIL verification and IPL…

Locate suppliers in the chemical, petrochemical and refining industries.

The year in review recalls some of the most important events of 2016, and the 2017 Supplier Sourcing Guide Directory is a look forward – a tool we hope helps you throughout the new year.
The 2017 Supplier Source Guide is an easy-to-use guide to help locate suppliers to the chemical, petrochemical and refining industries.
The guide is broken out into five primary categories:1. Asset Management2. Automation3. Environmental Protection4. Processing Equipment5. Safety/Security.
Each of these main categories includes several product sub-categories listed within them.
This easy-to-use directory lists suppliers in 43 categories of equipment, products, services and software. We also have a special section focusing on 72 engineering, construction…

Locate suppliers in the chemical, petrochemical and refining industries.

The year in review recalls some of the most important events of 2016, and the 2017 Supplier Sourcing Guide Directory is a look forward – a tool we hope helps you throughout the new year.
The 2017 Supplier Source Guide is an easy-to-use guide to help locate suppliers to the chemical, petrochemical and refining industries.
The guide is broken out into five primary categories:1. Asset Management2. Automation3. Environmental Protection4. Processing Equipment5. Safety/Security.
Each of these main categories includes several product sub-categories listed within them.
This easy-to-use directory lists suppliers in 43 categories of equipment, products, services and software. We also have a special section focusing on 72 engineering, construction…

Locate suppliers in the chemical, petrochemical and refining industries.

The year in review recalls some of the most important events of 2016, and the 2017 Supplier Sourcing Guide Directory is a look forward – a tool we hope helps you throughout the new year.
The 2017 Supplier Source Guide is an easy-to-use guide to help locate suppliers to the chemical, petrochemical and refining industries.
The guide is broken out into five primary categories:1. Asset Management2. Automation3. Environmental Protection4. Processing Equipment5. Safety/Security.
Each of these main categories includes several product sub-categories listed within them.
This easy-to-use directory lists suppliers in 43 categories of equipment, products, services and software. We also have a special section focusing on 72 engineering, construction…

A new nonmetallic catalyst promises to enable economical hydrogen-based substitution reactions that now require expensive or hazardous synthesis routes.

A new nonmetallic catalyst promises to enable economical hydrogen-based substitution reactions that now require expensive or hazardous synthesis routes, e.g., making hydrosilanes from chlorosilanes as well as hydrides from halides, believe researchers at Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany. The borane catalyst splits hydrogen molecules under mild conditions and should suit broad-scale use, they say.
The researchers created the catalyst by introducing boron atoms into a common organic molecule (Figure 1). The catalyst provides ambiphilic metal-like reactivity toward H2; tests so far indicate yields are comparable to conventional metallic catalysts.
“What we additionally need is just an electron source. In the laboratory we chose…

A carbon-based molecular sieve membrane combined with a reverse osmosis process could significantly reduce energy needed to separate alkyl aromatics hydrocarbon molecules, says a research team from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech),…

Conco Systems, Pty Ltd. of Heatherbrae, Australia, an affiliate of Conco Services Corporation in Verona, PA, USA, acquires Gogolok IndustrieService GmbH (GIS) of Magdeburg, Germany. GIS specializes in industrial cleaning of plate heat exchangers, air cooled condensers and general maintenance cleaning services. The incorporation of GIS infrastructure, human resources and service capabilities into the Conco family will support Conco’s growth in the European market and an expansion of the global service portfolio, according to the company.
Conco Systems Pty Ltd. is the Australian contingent of a worldwide group of Conco companies providing condenser and heat exchanger products and services to the power generation and industrial sectors.

The U.S. Department of Energy announces nearly $25 million to enable innovative electrical motors used in manufacturing.

The U.S. Department of Energy announces nearly $25 million for 13 projects aimed at advancing energy-efficient electric motor technologies through applied research and development. The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s (EERE) Next Generation Electric Machines projects will address the limitations of traditional materials and designs used in electric motor components by cost-effectively enhancing their efficiency, improving their performance and reducing weight. This effort will support approaches to improve the technology in industrial electric motors, which use approximately 70% of the electricity consumed by U.S. manufacturers and nearly a quarter of all electricity consumed nationally, according to EERE.
Improvements…

Locate suppliers in the chemical, petrochemical and refining industries.

The year in review recalls some of the most important events of 2016, and the 2017 Supplier Sourcing Guide Directory is a look forward – a tool we hope helps you throughout the new year.
The 2017 Supplier Source Guide is an easy-to-use guide to help locate suppliers to the chemical, petrochemical and refining industries.
The guide is broken out into five primary categories:1. Asset Management2. Automation3. Environmental Protection4. Processing Equipment5. Safety/Security.
Each of these main categories includes several product sub-categories listed within them.
This easy-to-use directory lists suppliers in 43 categories of equipment, products, services and software. We also have a special section focusing on 72 engineering, construction…

Advisory firm International eChem says that warning signs from the chemical industry point to a global recession in 2017, according to an article from Investment Week. The global chemical capacity utilization percentage (CU%), a measure which the firm says correlates closely to global GDP, reportedly dropped to its lowest level since 2009 this year, which the firm warns is an indicator of global economic slowdown.
The CU% has reportedly been in a steady decline for the last year, according to the firm’s chairman Paul Hodges. In the article, Hodges also warns of increased currency volatility due to protectionism-driven trade wars.
Read more about the firm's predictions here.

Transferring expertise and knowledge of experienced staff to engineers beginning their careers is hardly a new issue for chemicals makers. However, the ongoing wave of retiring baby boomers (see: “Retirement Casts a Long Shadow”) is prompting…

Siemens Water Solutions will use Meidensha Corporation’s ceramic flat-sheet membrane in its new PACT Membrane Bioreactor for wastewater treatment.

Siemens Water Solutions will reportedly use Meidensha Corporation’s ceramic flat-sheet membrane in its new PACT Membrane Bioreactor (MBR) for wastewater treatment in the oil refinery and petrochemical industries, and other wastewater treatment environments. Siemens PACT technology has reportedly been installed at more than 100 locations.
Siemens’ PACT MBR is a powdered activated carbon-based wastewater treatment system that provides biological/physio-chemical/and ultrafiltration technology in a single, compact system, according to Meidensha. After extensive testing, Siemens approved Meidensha’s ceramic flat-sheet membrane for use in its PACT MBR system because of the membrane’s durability, abrasion resistance and long service life…

Debate continues over the merits of putting a price on carbon emissions — with many businesses opposing such a move. However, an increasing number of companies are adopting carbon pricing, according to a report released in September by CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), London, a not-for-profit organization backed by institutional investors and others. The publication notes that carbon pricing already has spurred some firms to reallocate investments.
Called “Embedding a Carbon Price into Business Strategy,” the report summarizes the disclosures of companies around the world that responded to CDP’s 2016 climate-change and supply-chain information requests. A total of 1,249 firms revealed that they already price carbon…

With the aim to reduce toxic exposure, agency fast tracks the evaluation of five chemicals

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is continuing its brisk pace to be on target with implementing the new requirements of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), as amended by the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century…

Manufacturers must evaluate where to focus efforts to protect sensitive data.

Cybercriminals love chemical companies. In fact, IBM X-Force Research’s 2016 Cyber Security Intelligence Index cites chemical companies as one of the top targets for attackers, according to an article from Manufacturing Business Technology. The attacks are reportedly often financially-motivated and state-sponsored attempts to steal intellectual property and trade secrets.
So what can manufacturers do? The article’s author lays out a list of prevention methods beginning with a vulnerability management plan and ongoing vulnerability scans. According to the article, manufacturers should also promote company-wide security awareness, prepare an incident response plan, harden the security configurations of systems and servers and evaluate…

Locate suppliers in the chemical, petrochemical and refining industries.

The year in review recalls some of the most important events of 2016, and the 2017 Supplier Sourcing Guide Directory is a look forward – a tool we hope helps you throughout the new year.
The 2017 Supplier Source Guide is an easy-to-use guide to help locate suppliers to the chemical, petrochemical and refining industries.
The guide is broken out into five primary categories:1. Asset Management2. Automation3. Environmental Protection4. Processing Equipment5. Safety/Security.
Each of these main categories includes several product sub-categories listed within them.
This easy-to-use directory lists suppliers in 43 categories of equipment, products, services and software. We also have a special section focusing on 72 engineering, construction…

Locate suppliers in the chemical, petrochemical and refining industries.

The year in review recalls some of the most important events of 2016, and the 2017 Supplier Sourcing Guide Directory is a look forward – a tool we hope helps you throughout the new year.
The 2017 Supplier Source Guide is an easy-to-use guide to help locate suppliers to the chemical, petrochemical and refining industries.
The guide is broken out into five primary categories:1. Asset Management2. Automation3. Environmental Protection4. Processing Equipment5. Safety/Security.
Each of these main categories includes several product sub-categories listed within them.
This easy-to-use directory lists suppliers in 43 categories of equipment, products, services and software. We also have a special section focusing on 72 engineering, construction…

Locate suppliers in the chemical, petrochemical and refining industries.

The year in review recalls some of the most important events of 2016, and the 2017 Supplier Sourcing Guide Directory is a look forward – a tool we hope helps you throughout the new year.
The 2017 Supplier Source Guide is an easy-to-use guide to help locate suppliers to the chemical, petrochemical and refining industries.
The guide is broken out into five primary categories:1. Asset Management2. Automation3. Environmental Protection4. Processing Equipment5. Safety/Security.
Each of these main categories includes several product sub-categories listed within them.
This easy-to-use directory lists suppliers in 43 categories of equipment, products, services and software. We also have a special section focusing on 72 engineering, construction…

If you use desiccant air dryers in your plant, you probably know they can consume a lot of energy dollars. Much of this money often is wasted. However, you likely can take a number of steps to reduce your desiccant dryer costs and improve the dryer operation, leading to better air quality. Here, we’ll look at five factors worth attention: specifications check, dryer control, desiccant protection, adjustments and maintenance.
First let’s consider operating costs, though. Compressed air is one of the most expensive utilities to use in doing anything in your plant. This is because of the poor “wire to work” conversion efficiency of the compression process. Only ≈10–15% of the energy put into a compressor actually converts to…

The U.S. Department of Energy announces nearly $25 million to enable innovative electrical motors used in manufacturing.

The U.S. Department of Energy announces nearly $25 million for 13 projects aimed at advancing energy-efficient electric motor technologies through applied research and development. The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s (EERE) Next Generation Electric Machines projects will address the limitations of traditional materials and designs used in electric motor components by cost-effectively enhancing their efficiency, improving their performance and reducing weight. This effort will support approaches to improve the technology in industrial electric motors, which use approximately 70% of the electricity consumed by U.S. manufacturers and nearly a quarter of all electricity consumed nationally, according to EERE.
Improvements…

The new website is designed to be more visually appealing and user friendly.

Paratherm – Heat Transfer Fluids introduces a newly redesigned website. The new website is designed to be more visually appealing and user friendly, according to the company. The new Paratherm website reportedly performs many of the same duties as Paratherm employees in assisting hot oil system users and others interested in indirect heating technology.
The website is aimed at fluid customers, OEM design engineers, process managers, fluid specifiers and maintenance professionals. It provides technical details of Paratherm heat transfer fluid products, including product data, safety data and physical and thermal properties. The website also offers technical advice regarding hot-oil system safety, maintenance and reliability and detailed…

Water availability is a growing concern, prompting important initiatives by chemical companies, as our recent cover story “Keep Calm and Save Water,” underscores. Of course, the issue has much broader implications — and this has led to the…

Focusing on an implementation’s true consequences can lead to more cost-effective results

Undertaking an energy assessment can be a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be if the energy expert can understand and follow an “impact analysis.” So, this column will cover this methodology and cite a few examples of how to undertake an impact analysis while doing energy assessments.
Published ASME standards for energy assessments provide a good starting point and offer guidelines for conducting these assessments. Nevertheless, our resources — budgets, human resources, and time — are always limited. Hence, there’s a strong need to undertake energy assessments from an impact-level perspective and increase the cost-effectiveness of these efforts. We are still talking about a systems approach; I’m not suggesting cutting…

Process Engineering White Papers

State Based Control is a plant automation control design based on the principle that all process facilities operate in recognized, definable Process States that represent a
variety of normal and abnormal conditions of the process. State Based Control, implemented with the latest developments in object-based technologies, delivers
direct benefits to its adopters in a variety of Operational Excellence categories. It results in productivity increases, higher asset utilization of both people and process,
automated responses and recovery for abnormal conditions and provides an environment for knowledge capture directly into the control design.

Sure, the process engineer is proud of his HMI (human machine interface) and the operations manager is pleased with his KPI (key performance indicators) dashboard and how effectively the system is running with the implementation of his new MES/MIS solution. The historian and analytic solution get all the credit when a field equipment crisis is averted. Does anyone ever think to thank the lowly driver? Without data, the HMI is just a pretty picture, and the best analytics in the world are only ideas without any basis in fact. Plus, tens or hundreds of thousand dollars are spent on that, while the driver budget isn't even a line item on the spec sheet. The communication arteries and veins reach out to all areas of the field equipment, sending and receiving data, efficiently and tirelessly ensuring the ability to acquire, analyze and adapt to the situations at hand.

The WirelessHART standard provides a robust wireless protocol for the full range of process measurement, control and asset management applications. Based on the proven and familiar HART protocol, it enables users to quickly and easily gain the benefits of wireless technology while maintaining compatibility with existing devices, tools and systems.

Plants across the world are increasingly having to make thedecision to implement wireless technology in their industrial facilities. The right decision enables an infrastructure that provides significant benefits from wire savings to improved operations. Wireless is a complex enabling technology that requires many considerations before broad deployment in an industrial facility.

Except for a few odd services, high liquid rate applications are typically the domain of either trays or random packings. Aside from the distributors, random packing designs are rather straightforward with the designer choosing the proper size to accommodate the fluid flow rates and achieve the desired efficiency. Trays, on the other hand, have a large variety of adjustable parameters and can be especially complex, especially when designed for high liquid rate applications.

This white paper provides some insight into the process for safely implementing Foundation fieldbus in an area of your facility that has a hazardous classification.

Dow Chemical maintains thousands of batch control systems world-wide built on its proprietary MOD 5 computer system. Over decades, they have been meticulous to preserve and enhance these systems. Dow intends to preserve and reap the rewards of this diligence by developing reverse engineering best practices and tools to migrate this intellectual property to next-generation platforms.

Batch manufacturing systems must maintain the status of equipment, including which are available, dirty, out of service, etc. In industries that enforce Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs), additional status types and values for process equipment must be maintained. Rules associated with the equipment status can be complex and involve the equipment class, current equipment state and time in the current
state. This paper covers the operator interface used to review the equipment status and the interlocking requirements between the recipe and batch phases based on multiple status types.

Nine manufacturers participated in the FuRIOS study, which was conduced under the lead of an end user company that compared its use of fieldbus and remote I/O in full detail.

This document describes best practices for the reference architecture for a process control system network and its interfaces to a corporate network. The papers objective is to give the reader an understanding of the techniques utilized to securely connect these networks.

Advanced diagnostics, some of which are available today, will go beyond alarming transmitter
failures to actually predict impending failures in the complete measurement system. This will
significantly reduce unscheduled shutdowns, and also reduce the risk of onscale failure.

Automation designers face many challenges and tradeoffs in the development of a successful network solution. This white paper discusses the necessary choices in selecting a network technology appropriate for various specific applications.